Attention allocation in the dual‐task paradigm as measured through behavioral and psychophysiological responses

Abstract

We investigated attention allocation in a dual-task paradigm using behavioral and pupillary measures. We used an auditory digit span (DS) and a simple visual response time (RT) task. Participants were administered four conditions in which they performed neither task (no-task), a single task (DS or RT only), or both tasks (dual). Dependent variables were DS accuracy, RT, and task-evoked pupillary responses (TEPRs) to digits as estimates of mental effort. Participants maintained almost the same level of DS accuracy on dual as on DS only and sacrificed speed on the RT task. As expected, TEPRs increased linearly with memory load in both DS only and dual. Although TEPRs were initially higher in dual than in DS only, the slope of the increase was shallower in dual. Results suggest that TEPRs can elucidate mechanisms of attention allocation by distinguishing between effectiveness (level of behavioral performance) and efficiency (the costs of that performance in mental effort).

Pupil diameter measurement errors as a function of gaze direction in corneal reflection eyetrackers

“…It has been used to assess classical violations of expectation tasks (Jackson & Sirois, 2009;Sirois & Jackson, 2012), individual differences in face processing (Gredebäck, Eriksson, Schmitow, Laeng, & Sternberg, 2012), and perception of irrational events by infants (Gredebäck & Melinder, 2010. Task-elicited changes in pupil diameter have also been studied in adults (see Beatty, 1982, for a review) with, for example, eye saccade tasks (Evens & Ludwig, 2010), Stroop tasks (Brown et al, 1999;Laeng, Orbo, Holmlund, & Miozzo, 2011;Siegle, Steinhauer, & Thase, 2004), and dual tasks (Karatekin, 2004;Karatekin, Couperus, & Marcus, 2004).…”

Is pupillary response a reliable index of word recognition? Evidence from a delayed lexical decision task

“…Another remarkable property is that it is not affected by a participant's strategies, because it is quite difficult to control voluntarily. Due to these advantages, the pupillary response has been widely used in cognitive psychology to study a large variety of cognitive processes, including attention allocation (Karatekin, Couperus, & Marcus, 2004), face perception (Goldinger, He, & Papesh, 2009), arithmetic (Klingner, Tversky, & Hanrahan, 2011), and working memory (Heitz, Schrock, Payne, & Engle, 2008), among others.…”

The benefit of deep processing and high educational level for verbal learning in young and middle-aged adults

“…Longer RTs would then represent less efficient mobilization of processing resources and more retrieval effort. This is in accordance with dual task paradigms in which RTs are also used as estimates of mental effort (24). Because deeper processing results in better maintenance of words in memory, deeperprocessed words are expected to require less retrieval effort than shallow-processed words.…”